Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures

Today, I’m going to talk about Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures. Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures is an organization which has the mission to connect celebrated authors with the community, elevate civic discourse, and inspire creativity and a passion for the literary arts. Most of their events take place Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Personally, I haven’t been to any of the events they hosted in previous years, but it seems like this organization is doing their best to bring in famous authors to Pittsburgh to really bring in the literary arts community together and celebrate the authors haha.

For their events, which they call it Ten Evenings, they bring in ten different authors to Pittsburgh at different time of the year. Currently, there are 7 out of 10 events listed on the website and for each event (called by the author names), you can access the author’s page to learn more about the author and also purchase the tickets.

Posters

I played around with stroke weights, linespacing, and horizontal shifts to set the events’ content hierarchy for the potential Ten Evenings poster (but, except five events instead of ten haha).

Stroke Weights

By changing only the stroke weighs, I tried to look at what should be highlighted so that it sets the hierarchy but also sets the rhythm and and implied structure within the canvas space. For example, the middle one shows how the dates are bolded and the place where it’s held at is bolded to set the order and make the implied structure as I mentioned earlier.

2. Linespacing

By changing the line spacing, I also divided the content by each different event that’s being held to set the visual flow. The third example shows how too many spacing between each line can have a reverse effect (breaking the visual flow, rather than setting one).

3. Horizontal shift: two flush-left margins

By creating flushed-margin, I could emphasize certain parts of the information more, and push the others in to create that module/space.

4. Horizontal shift: three flush-left margins

Similar to the last example, the margins help set the visual flow and creates a literal space within the canvas. I really like the third example because the dates are legible and the bottom four lines flushed to the left stay together and it’s compositionally a bit playful.

5 & 6. Colors + Size Changes

Next, I played around with the colors and also tried to blend in with the other aspects I explored in the earlier exercises. For these exercises, I focused on both visual flow and how viewers enter into the piece. For example, for the color exercises, due to the large green shapes, viewers can easily see the poster from far back and read the rest of the information up close. And, with the different sizes of fonts and placement within the page for the last three exercises, I tried to explore visual flow, asking myself, “how does the viewer maneuver through the page when they are decently up close at the poster.

7. Imagery

After playing around with the hierarchy of texts, I started asking myself, did I explore enough with colors and imagery? How can images and colors truly depict the mood of this whole event? Next thing I did after asking these questions was to find images that captured how “I” felt about this whole event which was very calm, slow, and book-reading/discussion feeling (I don’t know how to explain this haha). Here is the moodboard I created:

Next, I translated them with the content. Here are some of my explorations:

After exploring with imageries, I realized that I didn’t like everything I made for sure, but some of them really stood out to me due to the calm, conversational, intimate feeling that created which I thought really fits the theme of the event. So I decided to push them a little further.

At this point, I kind of got bored and wanted to explore the concept further with graphics… and color of course haha. I went back to the website to observe the event closer.. What caught my eyes was the environments where these events take place.

Some More… (final explorations)

Wait Hi Vicky! I have something going on right now.. I’ll come back to this medium post tonight to finish writing!! Thank you!!